


Call Me Phil

by scribblemyname



Series: Comment Fic LiveJournal Stories [143]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Community: comment_fic, Fluff, Gen, Humor, Maria Hill's Nespresso, Not at all Agents of SHIELD Compliant, Phil Coulson the Cat, Possibly Not CA:TWS Compliant, Post-Battle of New York (Marvel), Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Reincarnation, SHIELD, Spies & Secret Agents, partners
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-17
Updated: 2015-01-19
Packaged: 2018-02-21 12:56:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2468972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblemyname/pseuds/scribblemyname
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Why do you think this friend was reincarnated as a cat?"</p><p>"Because he's anal-retentive, loves paperwork, knows everything, and wants me to call him 'Phil.'"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Cheese

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Scathach](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scathach/gifts).



> Prompt by yuidirnt at the LJ Comment Fic comm: [any, any, a loved one reincarnates into a cat](http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/564942.html?thread=79430094#t79430094)
> 
>  
> 
> Soundly ignoring all things Agents of SHIELD.

The kitten shows up the day after the funeral, a mewling little white and brown ball of fluff on Maria's welcome mat that she steps over with a sigh while deciding just how problematic this is going to be. _Phil_ would at least give the poor thing a square meal before dropping it off at an overcrowded animal shelter to be euthanized. She thinks she kind of hates that her conscience is starting to sound like him.  
  
She feeds the cat. It's not the kitten's fault that he reminds her of Phil and curls up into a tiny fist-sized ball of growly purrs that's too cute to give away to certain death.  
  
"I'll find you a good home, but then that's it," Maria warns him. "You're out."  
  
The kitten yawns, pink tongue lapping roughly against her hand, then falls back to sleep. It doesn't exactly help her resolve.  


* * *

  
  
She takes the kitten to work and tries to foist it off on any poor, susceptible sap in the building, but SHIELD isn't exactly loaded with warm fuzzy types and she seems stuck with the animal, who has developed an alarming tendency to look reproachful when Maria doesn't file something properly or doesn't go to eat at her normal time to pick up lunch (she used to go with Phil when they were both in the building) or when she goes hard on somebody Phil would've been lenient with. When she starts ranting at Coulson for daring to die on her, the kitten sits up on its haunches and yowls.  
  
She snatches up the cat and takes him out to her car long enough to get a grip on herself. "I can't take you anywhere," she admonishes.  
  
He licks her cheek, and she remembers all the times she told Phil that in exasperation right before he pecked her cheek and told her everything would be fine.  
  
"It won't, you know," she tells him before she thinks about the fact that this _isn't_ Phil, isn't even human, but he just looks at her reproachfully and mews.  
  
Life goes on. She knows that, but maybe for once, she wishes that it wouldn't.  


* * *

  
  
The cat becomes Maria's cat and takes over her two desks, the one at home and the one at work. Fury raises the eyebrow over his good eye and she just tells him, "Don't start."  
  
Cats are supposed to like windows and beds and couches and pillows, maybe even the comfiest chairs in the house (and her ridiculously expensive chair at work is _very_ comfortable), but her cat likes the desk where he can survey her realm, shove important papers her way, and clamber between her and her computer screen to yowl whenever he thinks it's time for her to eat.  
  
Remarkably, he seems to know Maria's coffee, work, and shouldn't-you-be-knocking-off schedule ( _'Aren't you being hypocritical, Phil?'_ ) like the back of his paw before she makes any effort to teach it to him.  
  
He perks up at the names Coulson or Phil, unless she's currently reaming him a new one, in which case he usually argues with her like the stubborn cat he is.  
  
"What's his name?" Sharon asks with interest a few months after he's claimed the office.  
  
Maria hesitates a moment, then says on a whim, "Cheese."  
  
He blinks, then meows piteously.  
  
Sharon smiles. "That's cute."  
  
It's not, but Maria just smiles back without explaining why she chose the name.  


* * *

  
  
Cheese answers when called but always with a plaintive complaint and starts showing up enthusiastically and purring when she's complaining to Phil.  
  
Something clicks in her head then about the oddness of the timing of her accidental kitten acquisition, and Maria has certainly seen crazier things in SHIELD, but she shakes it off. There is no way in any world that makes sense that her best friend and work husband was reincarnated as a cat.  
  
"I refuse to call you Phil."  
  
Cheese whines and begs with one paw.  
  
Maria crosses her arms. "You're going to have to do better than that to change my mind."  
  
Cheese runs off toward her bedroom, and she assumes that's the end of that.  


* * *

  
  
It isn't. Of course, it isn't.  
  
It's starting to give her a headache.

 

 

* * *

Cheese pushes a DVD with his nose across the coffee table on Thursday night, then lifts his head to check out her reaction. Maria takes one look and tries to unsee it. It's the movie she and Phil were going to watch after the craziness was over.

_"How about when this is over, we watch one of your Italian movies and eat comfort food?"_

_"You just want my cannoli," she'd griped back. "And they're not Italian."_

_"We're saving the world from a demigod. You don't think some pampering is in order?"_

_"Fine. Sleepless in Seattle."_

_Phil winced but agreed. "As long as there's cannoli."_

"I'm ignoring this," she says.

Cheese sniffs his disdain and heads for the kitchen.

"Why did I ever keep the cat?" she complains and goes to snatch him back.

They curl up on the couch in front of the TV and watch Sleepless in Seattle. Cheese only tries begging her three times before huffing a sigh.

The next night she makes cannoli and promises herself to see a psychiatrist before it gets any worse.

It gets worse.

* * *

He starts bringing her gifts, the kinds of things Phil would drop off at her desk from time to time—books, reports she wanted to wrangle out of this difficult agent (Barton) or another (Romanoff), and little flags on news items she wanted to keep an eye on. She was beginning to wonder if someone had given the cat a Starkphone, but after a thorough runthrough of all the security cameras for the day, she discovers that Cheese has simply been making friends and reading over shoulders and begging said friends until they figure out he wants some kind of note with the information on it, which he then takes to Natasha, who solemnly turns it into a tip, a slap on the back of her partner's head for a report, a report of her own, or a book.

It's scary is what it is.

* * *

"I think my friend was reincarnated as a cat," Maria tells the psychiatrist bluntly, who shows some amount of professional cred that he doesn't look even slightly taken aback. "Do I need pills or grief therapy or…"

"Pardon me, Deputy Director," the doctor interjects as her voice trails off. "But _why_ do you think this friend was reincarnated as a cat?"

"Because he's anal-retentive, loves paperwork, knows everything, and wants me to call him 'Phil.'" Maria sighs in frustration. "Do you have something you can do about this? I have a job to do."

"Is this interfering with your job?"

Worrying that she might be going crazy is. She settles for shaking her head. "I don't believe in reincarnation."

The doctor smiles. "That must be a trifle uncomfortable."

* * *

"Hill. You cannot fire my psychiatrist," Fury tells her while she's fuming over the reports Cheese brought her an hour ago and eating too much takeout and drinking coffee Clint Barton must have had something to do with because it tastes like swill.

"I do have hiring and firing power in the medical branch," Maria points out. She bats Cheese away from the last of the eggrolls, which he protests piteously. She is pitiless, as Phil had often pointed out. "Cat food or no food for you."

Fury leans back his head and sighs deeply. "He's my actual psychiatrist, Hill."

She pauses. Oh. Grudgingly, she takes the pink slip she's written up and runs it through the shredder. "Will there be anything else, sir?"

"Yeah, there is. Keep that cat off your computer or make him stop flagging agents."

Maria's caught flat-footed. "Sir?"

"He's been flagging agents that Romanoff or Barton don't like and several others for even more mysterious reasons. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you, Hill?"

She stares at Cheese who has made himself scarce behind the lone survivor of the potted plants Phil used to leave in her office to die. (He claimed he was saving them from his own neglect, but Coulson had hardly been the only workaholic in SHIELD headquarters.)

"I'll make it my business to know."

"Excellent."

Once Fury is gone, she glares at him and chases him from behind the plant. "Do not touch my computer, or I will _never_ call you 'Phil.'"

A disdainful and very catlike meow makes her thinks she's going crazy again, but a week later, she hears Fury taking Barton to task for letting a cat play on his computer.

Maria makes a note to self that Barton has an office and she needs to know where it is, but otherwise lets it go.

* * *

Barton finds her twenty-five hours later looking harried and frustrated. "Did you know I had an office?"

Maria's eyebrows come up. "No."

"Yeah, well neither did I."

* * *

They get on the security cameras together to track down Cheese and what hidden room was Barton supposed to have been using to fill out reports and do busywork before he moved into the back corner of Phil's.

"Well, what do you know, Barton. You have an office."

* * *

Maria makes sure she's not present when Fury goes to give 'the talk' to Romanoff. She takes Cheese with her.

* * *

A cat lands on her back in the middle of the night, and all Maria wants to do is groan because she's had forty-eight hours with next to no sleep with a discussion with the World Security Council in the middle.

"What will it take to make you stop bothering me?" she demands and rolls over to get him off her back.

Cheese gingerly avoids her maneuver and lands on her stomach instead with a loud meow.

"Fine! Phil! Go to sleep."

For a long moment, the cat blinks at her, then he curls up on top of her and starts to purr.

She's not going crazy; she's already gone.


	2. The Cat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because y'all asked for more and because I had Bobbi feels after watching the latest AoS episode.

Maria has a cat.

Agent Bobbi Morse isn't sure if that's merely unexpected or downright scary, not until said cat—a brown and white half-grown kitten—shows up on her shoulder (startling the mess out of her, but she is a decorated field agent and _does not_ scream) to bat at her tablet with a soft meow as if he somehow understands what she is reading. He better not, she'd have to kill him.

"You are scary," she informs him evenly, then shrugs him off her shoulder while he claws at her uniform for purchase to keep from sliding down her back, fails, and lands with an aggrieved yowl on the floor. "Now, shoo."

The cat disappears.

* * *

The cat is also crafty.

* * *

Bobbi's reaching for her favorite coffee—Barton actually turned her onto the unbridled superiority of Maria Hill's secret stash of Nespresso—when she yelps indignantly at the scratch marks super-secret-spy-cat just managed to give her. "Okay. That's it."

She picks up the cat around his middle, neatly avoiding (or ignoring) his attempts to bite, scratch, and wriggle his way out of her grip while mewing indignantly, and puts him out of the break room.

"Now, shoo."

The cat's tail goes high into the air and he sniffs disdainfully. Bobbi shuts the door and heads for the Nespresso.

* * *

"Agent Morse," Maria stops her before she escapes the boring, semi-annual safety meeting, which generally includes all the varieties of hazing and pranks that are disallowed and Strike Team Delta is only to be emulated for their behavior _on the field_. "Could you stay for a moment."

It's not a question, so Bobbi answers, "Yes, ma'am," and sits back down.

Maria smiles, and all Bobbi's alarm bells start ringing. Maria stopped smiling for benign reasons right around the time she got the Deputy Directorship.

"Please remember that if you did not purchase an item and it was not gifted to you nor is it common property and further that it's labeled with someone else's name, that you are not to take it without permission." Maria glances pointedly at her own coffee cup on the conference room table.

Bobbi nods evenly. "Yes, ma'am."

"Consider this a warning." Maria sighs. "You're a good agent, Morse. You shouldn't listen to everything Barton says."

And when it comes to coffee, Barton will drink anything, so point, yeah, but he's generally right about the quality of other people's brew.

Bobbi just says, "Yes, ma'am."

As soon as she manages to actually escape, she looks around and hunts in favorite haunts until she finds The Cat and picks him up (despite all indignant protests—seriously, who does this cat think he is?) to give him a good tongue-lashing for getting her in trouble. "Seriously not okay."

And who cares if she probably shouldn't blame the cat and should probably look to see when the security cameras for the break room were last accessed? She knows it was the I'm-too-smart-for-my-own-good super-spy cat and knows how to give credit where it's due.

Feeling much better, she goes to find Barton and warn him.

* * *

"Aww, Cheese wouldn't tell on me." He knuckles the cat under his chin, and the cat actually purrs.

Bobbi crosses her arms and cocks an eyebrow. "Cheese?"

Barton shrugs. "Maria's cat. Her naming rights." His bland expression and delivery indicates his equal skepticism.

"In that case, Barton," she says with a grin, "I'm calling in that favor for Bolivia. You get your cup, bring me mine."

* * *

The cat tries to make nice with her, snuggling up on her lap later in the week, bearing the gift of a plastic-wrapped biscotti that couldn't have come from the cafeteria.

"I am not susceptible to bribes," she states and keeps on reading through her alerts.

Kicking the cat off her lap would be a failure to ignore. She ignores him.

* * *

Bobbi groans and lays her head down on Sharon's desk, who gives her the Look, which reads something to the effect of _'You're messing up my carefully organized chaos of paperwork and threatening to make the already teetering mountains of files actually do so, so get. off.'_ Bobbi is a master at ignoring the Look.

"What's with the biscotti, Carter?" She sits up before Sharon can cut her off. "No, I'm serious. Maria's cat is driving me crazy. He's been bringing me biscotti every Monday like Coulson used to do whenever he wanted me to do something for him, and seriously? The cat is doing this? _Maria's_ cat is doing this?"

Sharon sighs. "This isn't really my problem."

"I'll get you a cup of Nespresso." Bobbi clasps her hands together in mock pleading and looks hopeful.

"Ugh. Fine. But only if it's Maria's Nespresso and the wrath of the triumvirate doesn't visit me for it."

"Promise."

* * *

Barton gives her the Look, the one that goes like _'You've got to be kidding me.'_ "Bolivia wasn't that bad, Mock."

She gives him _her_ Look, the one that goes like _'It was if I say it was.'_ "Bolivia involved dragons. It was indeed that bad."

Barton mutters something unintelligible and unpleasant under his breath but gets her the cup of Nespresso.

* * *

It takes three days before Sharon shows up at Bobbi's desk, cat in tow. "What do you normally do on Monday mornings?"

Bobbi eyes the cat up with all due suspicion, which is getting to be quite a lot. "Read."

"Read what?"

"My alerts." Bobbi doesn't elaborate. Her alerts are full of all sorts of information she doesn't hand out lightly.

"Yeah, well,"—Sharon bounces the cat once to indicate—"he wants to look at them."

Coulson's the only guy she ever shared the highlights with. Bobbi crosses her arms and looks sternly at super-secret-spy cat. "Absolutely not," she replies.

* * *

The cat sulks.

She doesn't admit, she kind of misses the biscotti.

* * *

Bobbi ends up in medical for a seriously-it's-just-a-graze while Barton scoffs at her and makes sure she's okay before leaving her alone with the overbearing white coats like always. Sitwell used to check on her, but he's busy _handling_ Strike Team Delta (with mixed to no results) and Coulson used to check on her too, but Coulson's dead and Mack's off buried in R &D somewhere and her ex took off for greener pastures and…

And Coulson's dead.

She's a horrible patient and it's not surprising that the doctors dose her with enough painkiller to knock her out when she starts threatening to take off, soaked red bandages notwithstanding. When she finally wakes groggily a few hours later, there's the cat meowing softly on top of her stomach, carefully avoiding putting his weight on her injury.

"Crazy kitty." She knuckles him under the chin like she saw Barton do and the cat purrs. "You owe me a Nespresso," she says, and what does it say about her that she's talking to a cat? But seriously, she's still groggy and disoriented from the drugs.

She thinks about it for a moment then adds, "And a biscotti."

* * *

The first Monday after she gets out of Medical, Bobbi's reading through her alerts and finds herself with a lapful of the Cat, who drops a plastic-wrapped biscotti there, then clambers up to her shoulder where, "You are way too heavy for that."

She puts him back on her lap and lowers the tablet so they can both read. He meows when he sees something interesting. She sighs and prints out the ones he wants.

"Crazy cat."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So not a lot of closure on this chapter, but I'm just winging it and there are a lot more prompts to hit as yet. :grins:


	3. An Interlude in Yarn

She bought him a sweater.

Maria Hill was nothing if not responsible and as winter approached, Phil sneezed several times when it got too cold in her office. He seemed to think she would buy a nice space heater like the kind he always used to keep in his office. She didn't. She bought him a soft baby blue sweater and _laughed_ when he took one look then went skittering out the door into the rest of SHIELD headquarters.

"You big baby," her voice followed behind him, still laughing.

Too bad Phil ran smack into Fury's feet and meowing piteously didn't save him from being snagged and manhandled into Fury's unyielding grip where he stayed until handed over to the Deputy Director, who smile and nodded politely.

"Thank you, sir."

"Your cat needs a leash."

Phil hissed.

Maria chuckled and stuck the sweater over his head while he yowled futile protests. "I know," she agreed then set him down and let him run off to his heart's content.

* * *

Clint took a picture.

Melinda May nearly spewed her coffee and shot him a small smile before shooing him off her desk with a file folder.

Sharon chased him away from her bagel.

Bobbi ignored him begging around her legs and finally sighed, threw her head back, and huffed, "Cheese! I will march you back to Maria myself if you keep bothering me."

Natasha showed him the picture Clint had sent her and scratched behind his ears. "You always liked that color."

He couldn't even escape Simmons wanting to cuddle him _(Oh, how cute!)_ and Fitz only finally got rid of him by looking around for a test subject.

* * *

Phil finally mewed defeat and returned to Maria's office while she was out to camp out on her keyboard, where he hissed until she finally went home at a reasonable hour.

"Impossible cat." But she was smiling.


	4. An Interlude in Paperwork

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, a brief one, mostly because I created this in draft and don't want it to die ignobly while I figure out how to double the chapter size, so.

The first time Natasha sees Cheese is when Maria hauls the kitten into work and asks anyone, anyone at all, to please take him.

Natasha shoots Maria a tight smile. "I have my hands full with Liho." And finding a catsitter when she's out of the country is already hard enough without having two.

The kitten mews at her while Maria absently scratches behind his ears. "I can't keep him."

But she does. Keep him, that is.

—

Natasha has her own cat, a rusty black stray disdainful of the lesser society of anyone other than her chosen human. Clint pretends he's offended but she's caught them napping together when they think no one's looking. Liho wandered into Natasha's life a year and a half ago and refused to make her independent bed anywhere not in Natasha's apartment, so she has experience with cats.

It only takes her two days to get suspicious, three days to set up surveillance, and ten before she confirms that Maria's cat is not a cat. Or at least, he wasn't, once upon a time.

"Barton." She plucks the book out of his hand as she breezes into Phil's old office where Strike Team Delta always used to meet and still does.

"I was reading that!"

"Hm." She glances over the page as she asks offhand, "What was Phil's favorite food?"

"Spaghetti." Clint grunts as he reaches around her for the book, unsuccessfully.

"Do you remember how he used to get it?" she asks. He won't be any good for questioning if she lets him read. He'll grunt unintelligible answers instead until she elbows him for attention.

But he's not reading, so he answers without even thinking about it. "Yeah. He'd bring a carnation by for the cook."

Natasha slips the bookmark into place, snaps the book shut, and hands it to him. "Thank you."

He gripes and grumbles but doesn't think to ask her why she wanted to know.

—

The cat stops by the kitchen with a carnation. The cook gets teary-eyed and makes spaghetti. Maria takes a plate of it to her desk and the cat steals as many bites as she'll let him get away with.

It's obvious, really.

—

"Cheese?" Natasha's eyebrows go up at the absurd name Maria has saddled the cat with.

Clint shrugs with a pointedly nonjudgmental expression. "Her cat."

Natasha goes to work that night hacking the files for whatever excellent blackmail material could possibly have given Phil such an outrageous nickname. She doesn't find the story, but she does find it used as a callsign during one of his undercover missions.

"Cheese, huh?" She props her chin on her hands at Phil's desk and watches him sniff at one of the miraculously still living plants sitting at the corner of it. "I've been watering them."

Clint is good for many things. Keeping houseplants alive is not one of them.

The cat purrs and pads over to the inbox full of reports she and Clint haven't finished filling out. He paws at them and mews plaintively.

Natasha rolls her eyes and sits up to lock down her laptop. "Once a nag, always a nag."

That earns a displeased yowl. It just doesn't hold the same weight coming from a cat.

—

"What's this?" Clint demands when she drops a heap of paperwork on his chest in the bed.

Natasha curls up under the covers. "My reports are filed already. Those are yours."

His grumbling doesn't keep her up. Neither do the four papercuts, the one leaky pen, or the scratching sound of the good pen moving across two dozen forms for the next two and a half hours.

—

Maria eyes Natasha uncertainly when she brings them in.

"Blame Cheese." Natasha pets the cat and heads out.

Maria's 'huh' can be heard behind her.


End file.
